Acknowledgements - Language & Style

I would like to thank heartily the following individuals
and institutions for helping me make a mad idea a reality.

Dawn Archer, Stef Strong, Dan McIntyre, Ben Short and
Eszter McIntyre, the part-time research assistants who worked on the
project with me from time to time, and who have made the site ‘dance’ so
wonderfully, put in much more time and effort than they were paid for.
They are ‘the ones wot did it’. I just provided the too-many-words
that my students complain about.

During the teaching investigation I carried out using
the web course, Leonard Cohen, Roger McGough, Harold Pinter and Willy
Russell gave me free permission to use texts in copyright which they
had written. I am advised now by Lancaster University’s legal advisers
that I am able to make the site freely available to all without paying
copyright fees because of the fair dealing exception for the purposes
of criticism and review within the legislation (see the copyright declaration
on this site). But nonetheless, I would like to thank publicly these
wonderful writers for their initial generosity of mind, and I gratefully
include them as sponsors of this site. Similarly, I would like to thank
Oxford University Press (and Liz Mann in particular) for free permission
to use a poem by Henry Reed. If I have accidentally missed anyone out
of this list, I am more than willing to expand it. Please let me know!

The main funding for the course (and the pedagogical investigation
I have used it for) was provided by my National Teaching Fellowship (2000)
prize. The funding for the prize was provided by the Higher Education
Funding Council through the Institute for Learning and Teaching.

Lancaster University’s Centre for the Enhancement
of Learning and Teaching provided the funding to create the three self-assessment
mechanisms (one at the end of each of the three literary genre-based
sections of the course) to help students practise Stylistic Analysis.

Lancaster University’s Faculty of Social Sciences
provided funding to help complete the teaching investigation I have used
the site to conduct.

Professor Charles Alderson let us use a self-assessment
template he had developed for the Dialang language
self-assessment project.

Charles also provided a large amount of invaluable help
and advice, including helping us to improve the template for use in our
context lending us a research assistant from time to time.

Lancaster University’s Department of Linguistics
and English Language provided free office space, computers, and other
essentials during the 4-year period when the course was produced.

Lancaster University Television Unit (LUTV) and Mike O’Donoghue
(Department of Educational Research) provided free help and advice with
video and audio clips.

Dan McIntyre provided some of the drawings and cartoons
for the site. The rest were provided by my long-suffering brother-in-law,
A. J. (Ces) Brown.

Many, many people gave informal help and advice - too
many to mention. But I would in particular like to thank Graeme Hughes,
Alison Sharman, Hennie Yip, Mike Cowie and Damien Cashman. These wonderful
IT experts put up with a lot from ignorant me!

Three Lancaster students, Helena Greenwood, Alessandro
Mazzini and Carey Sveen acted out the extracts in the drama part of the
course and provided me with free use of their video clips.

Some American Junior Year Abroad students recorded the
extract from USA by John Dos Passos for me. I can’t find the record
of their permission to let me use their recording at the moment and so
can’t name them individually. I would be happy to do so if they
get in touch.

David Hoover gave me ‘The Three Billy Goats Graff’ and
some good advice too, and AhaJokes.com kindly allowed the use of some
of their jokes within the site.

The entire 2001-2 class of Ling 131, Language and
Style gave me free permission to use extracts from their essays
to create the self-assessment mechanisms on the site.

Finally, I would like to thank all those colleagues and
postgraduate students - and all very much friends - who have taught with
me on the 'traditional' version of Language and Style since Mike Breen
and I first created it in the late 1980s in the 'texts first' format
it has had ever since. They have all helped to create the materials which
I have adapted and built on for this web course. I will probably forget
some of the course teachers by accident (in which case let me know, please!).
In alphabetical order: Tom Barney, Carol Bellard-Thomson, Derek Bousfield,
Mike Breen, Hywel Coleman, Jonathan Culpeper, John Heywood, Dan McIntyre,
Hazel Medd, Judith Poole, Elena Semino, Stef Slembrouck, Angeliki Tzanne
and others.